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This article empirically investigates the effects of global shocks on EU-28 countries' patterns of specialisation by focusing on the global financial crisis of 2008. In particular, it addresses the following two research questions: Did the financial crisis change the patterns of specialisation of EU member states? Was the impact of the crisis homogenous across countries and manufacturing products? Answering these questions is important because changes in specialisation generate inequalities, given the shift of the demand from one factor to another. Using an unconditional quantile regression approach, this study demonstrates that the financial crisis had a positive effect which was larger on products in which countries were not specialised before the crisis. Some heterogeneity also emerged at both sectoral and geographical levels.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) are vital for safeguarding and enhancing foreign investments, pivotal in Global Production Networks (GPNs). This study assesses the impact of BITs on GPNs driven by EU multinational enterprises, with a focus on regions hosting corporate headquarters due to their influence on the local economy. While considering the endogeneity of BITs and their diverse effects on GPN structures, our findings reveal a positive correlation between BITs and GPNs, notably stronger in less globally integrated regions. Additionally, the influence varies based on firms' network role (headquarters or subsidiaries) and the spatial distribution of headquarters. BITs stimulate GPNs in less internationalized regions but have minimal impact in headquarters-rich regions.

This paper explores the role that judicial efficiency may play as a determinant of inward FDI at sub-national level. Italy is an ideal case to deal with this still unexplored issue since the same law apply in all the national territory, but the degree of law enforcement varies considerably across different courts. We found that judicial efficiency affects positively FDI inflows. This result, though heterogeneous across different economic sectors, is robust to different specifications and sample selections. Our results have interesting policy implications, since they highlight the importance of non-targeted FDI policies as factors driving inward flows.

In this letter, we study employer learning about worker ability during apprenticeship. We exploit an exogenous shock that increased the number of apprenticeship contracts in Italy, to analyse what type of workers were hired and which ones were trained more during the contract. We find that firms select workers according to their ability not upon recruiting them, but during the apprenticeships and the higher the revealed ability of the workers, the more training they receive.

This paper studies the impact on the length of school-to-work transition of a reform that extended from two to three years the short vocational track in Italy in the early 2000s. In the empirical analysis we use the Two Way Fixed Effect methodology to estimate the impact of the reform, exploiting its staggered implementation across regions. The analysis is restricted to graduates from the short vocational track before and after the reform. The results show that the reform had a positive impact and reduced school-to-work transition by around 5 months (a 24% reduction). Moreover, the new short vocational track proved to be extremely effective for migrants and females, whose school-to-work transition was reduced by 1.4 years and 0.9 years, respectively. In implementing the new short vocational track, some regions adopted a quasi-market organization in which private training institutions competed with public schools. This model proved to be more effective in shortening school-to-work transitions, in particular for migrants. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on the labor-market effect of vocational education by showing that lengthening the short vocational track, and changing the overall content of curricula, can speed up school-to-work transition.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use the two-way fixed effect (TWFE) methodology to estimate the impact of the reform, exploiting its staggered implementation across regions. The analysis is restricted to graduates from the short vocational track before and after the reform. Design/methodology/approach: This paper studies the impact on the length of school-to-work transition of a reform that extended from two to three years the short vocational track in Italy in the early 2000s. Findings: The study finds that the reform had a positive impact and reduced school-to-work transition by around five months (a 24% reduction). Moreover, the new short vocational track proved to be extremely effective for migrants and females, whose school-to-work transition was reduced by 1.4 years and 0.9 years, respectively. In implementing the new short vocational track, some regions adopted a quasi-market organization in which private training institutions competed with public schools. This model proved to be more effective in shortening school-to-work transitions, in particular for migrants. Originality/value: This study makes an important contribution to the literature on the labor-market effect of vocational education by showing that lengthening the short vocational track, and changing the overall content of curricula, can speed up school-to-work transition.

The authors study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in France, Italy, and Spain. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in mandated gender quotas within country and over time and uses a counterfactual methodology. Using firm-level accounting data and a difference-in-difference estimator, the authors find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where they find a positive impact on productivity. The authors then focus on Italy. Using a novel data set containing detailed information on board members’ characteristics, they offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas. The results provide an important contribution to the policy debate about the optimal design of legislation on corporate gender quotas.

In this paper, we explore econometrically the impact of judicial efficiency on the attractiveness to FDI of Italian municipalities. The distinctive contribution of this paper is manifold. First, we consider the efficiency of different types of judicial proceedings (i.e. enforcement of civil contracts and labour contracts) across local courts and of different judgment levels (i.e. first and second instance courts). Secondly, we consider an ideal case: Italy is a centralized country, where the same laws apply in all the national territory, but the degree of law enforcement varies considerably across different courts. Lastly, our results have interesting policy implications, since they may help in highlighting the importance of non-targeted FDI policies as factors driving the location choice of MNEs.

Economic literature shows that credit constraints have a negative impact on farm performance. The problem of credit constraints is particularly severe for the Italian agricultural sector given the structure and the legal status of most farms. The difficulties in providing collateral is even greater in the case of sole holders who represent almost 96% of whole Italian farms due to the direct link between farm and private capital. Credit market performance may be affected by judicial efficiency that guarantees the enforcement of contracts. We use court judicial efficiency as an instrument and exploit the great heterogeneity in efficiency of Italian courts across time and provinces to estimate the causal impact of credit constraints on farms’ productivity. We find that less credit constrained farms have a higher Total Factor Productivity. We also find that Italian farms, when faced with a less efficient judicial system, are less credit constrained, probably because banks tend to grant mainly subsidized loans.

This paper deals with the issue of the heterogeneity of productivity among three different groups of multinational firms according to where they invest. We use the procedure developed by Di Nardo et al (1996) and Melly (2005) to decompose the productivity gap across the entire productivity distribution in order to account for the relative importance of observed characteristics versus different returns. We find that the productivity gap suffered by firms that invest only in less developed countries is due to lower efficiency, not to worse characteristics. The most productive firms are those able to invest in both developed and less developed countries. They outperform firms investing only in one geographical area because of their better characteristics.

We study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. The empirical analysis is based on accounting panel data from Bureau Van Dijk's Amadeus. Our identification strategy relies on both double and triple difference estimators with ex-ante matching. We find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where we find a positive impact on productivity. We then focus on Italy and offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas using detailed information on board members' characteristics